Does anyone know how the effect of listening in the nearfield of an array is compared to listening in what is the farfield of all point source speakers?

As I read the information about speaker placement and room treatments, all of the presenters assume that one is looking at point source speakers which have huge amount of reflected sound before it reaches the listener; ie, farfield listening. If one is within the wall of sound produced by a properly designed array speaker system(that is, Jim Griffin's white paper), is there as much(I'm not saying zero) issue with room problems as there is with a point source system?

Marlboro