When you have a large number of mid and a large number of tweets, you have a much greater potential for having the different lines in the array getting seriously out of balance. This is easy to compensate in a passive arrangement without even doing the measurements. Its much harder to do in an array.

My bet is that some arrays built by DIYers and even professionals have not measured the sensitivity differences and compensated accurately for them.

My line array has a mid sensitivity of 95 and a tweeter sensitivity of 106. Even without looking at the frequency response and db's my tweeters will tend to be more forward.

Secondly, being in the near field will tend to make you feel more like you are in the middle of things. The nature of the beast is such that the midrange on an array will probably feel more intense.

Thirdly, with point source speakers only one or two speakers are handling the entire midrange. As the volume goes up so does the distortion, and the detail is lost. With Line arrays so many more speakers are handling the midrange(in my case actually 34 of them) that the detail is not lost as the volume goes up. This detail at high volumes is often mistaken for "forwardness".

Hope this helps. It may stuff you already know.

Hopefully others will step in and answer your question also

http://www.pesupport.com/cgi-bin/config.pl?read=341081

I do suspect that if you need a more laid back feeling, like being in the way back rows of a concert gig, that you either purchase an equalizer with your array, or that you stay away from Line arrays, which by their nature tend to put you front and center with the music, either because of the wide sound stage, or because of the extreme detail in the music.

Another work around is to use Jim Griffin's sound tapering, which will reduce the blooming felling that you may find irritating, unless its really a frequency area bloom.

Marlboro

I once owned a pair of line arrays built with inexpensive metal cone drivers that sounded very forward. These used first order crossovers that failed to control the woofer cone breakup adequately, resulting in a 6dB peak around 3khz. A revised second order crossover with a zoebel, combined with a 2nd order tweeter crossover with a notch filter solved the problem.