Your message pointed out an error that we are both making in terminology. The listening that I am talking about is the the "direct field" i.e. the field where the reverberant energy is negligable compared to the direct energy. This is quite different from the direct field of the source and they may or may not overlap. So your being in the near field of the line arrays does not mean that you are also in the direct field. I suspect that you are, but I wanted to be clear about this.

Also, the direct field tends to be frequency inpependnet, while the near field is highly frequency dependent. So the two may overlap at some frequencies and not at others.