CyberGene the sound from the distant mics was somehow compensated for the delay of the distant mics.
I believe that is what VI Labs call "phase aligning" all of their mic pairs. And it works beautifully.
Out of curiosity I once did a test (with Modern U as the piano):
At my piano I have four Wharfedale Diamond speakers, the upper pair gets the close mics, the lower pair gets the soundboard mics. Works splendidly.
So I thought: Well, what about those room mics. My TV and hi-fi, between two and three metres away in the same room, also have a pair of Diamonds. So I sent Modern U's room mics to that speaker pair. As one would expect over that distance, the resulting experience was very weird with the phase/time differences resulting from that two to three meter distance. It wasn't pretty π so end of test; back to four speakers.
Cheers and happy experiments,
HZ