The problem is if you're a foot away, you get peaks and nulls from the speaker bouncing off the wall and coming back.At recording studio London you never get these. Starting at some frequency, if you move out two feet, those peaks and nulls started at an even lower frequency, so it's actually worse. If you move out four feet, they start at a very low frequency.
Ideally, you would like to have the speakers right in the wall. Of course, in the big professional control room of Studio A at the big professional studio, yes, it will have near field speakers on the meter bridge, but they'll typically have really big monitors built right into the wall. The goal here when we were setting this up was to have the speakers very close to the wall. Obviously, we can't get them totally into the wall, so we have a 2 x 2 high frequency mini trap behind it so whatever sound does wrap around and leaks out the back, at least, then gets absorbed.