mshilarious, Schoeps' capsules are designed for 60-Volt polarization, not 48. So are all the capsules that Neumann uses nowadays. 48 Volts was never chosen as some ideal polarization voltage; it was simply what was available from an auxiliary lighting system belonging to a particular Scandinavian broadcasting organization that Neumann wanted to sell microphones to at one point in the 1960s. They designed the KM 84 arrangement as a one-off demo for that customer, who then placed a firm order for several dozen microphones--and that's how 48 Volts got started in the microphone world. But the capsule that Neumann used in the KM 84 had originally been designed for the KM 64, where it had been polarized at 60 Volts (i.e. 1/2 the standard plate voltage for an AC 701 vacuum tube, via a 1:2 voltage divider).
Actually, by that time phantom powering for condenser microphones had already been in use for a couple of years, mostly at the French radio with various 12-Volt implementations (one with the positive pole grounded, the other with the negative pole grounded as it would be today). Since those designs used DC converters anyway, they stepped the incoming voltage up to 60 Volts and got the full dynamic range performance from the capsules.
Schoeps' "Colette" (CMC) and CCM series microphones all polarize the capsules at 60 Volts whether the incoming phantom supply is at 12 Volts or 48; this is done with a DC converter. When you consider that 4 mA per microphone is being drawn, the phantom supply resistors already drop the 48 Volts to something like 35 at the microphone--so you can see why the DC converter is necessary. The older models such as the CMT 50 series (and Neumann's "fet 80" microphones such as the KM 84 and U 87) drew less than 1 mA apiece, reducing that voltage drop enough that DC converters weren't considered strictly necessary. Besides, back then very few 48-Volt phantom power supplies could put out 2 mA per microphone reliably, let alone 4 mA.
--best regards