Identification of in-duct acoustic source characteristics is essential in the design of fluid machinery system for reducing and predicting the flow-generated noise. To this end, the inverse estimation method can be employed by using the measured sound field and matrix formulation for wave propagation within a duct. In this paper, the effect of the distance between source and measurement plane is investigated. At each standoff distance, pressures are measured at three planes with two different spacings to widen the estimation frequency range, and measurements are conducted with three different standoff distances. Modal decomposition is applied to estimate modal amplitudes, and the result is used to reconstruct the velocity field at the source plane and to obtain the regenerated pressure field at the measurement planes. It is shown that the modal amplitude identified by measured pressure field at the short standoff distance, i.e., at nearfield, can yield an accurate reconstructed velocity field of the source and regenerate the pressure field with smaller error, which is similar to the other inverse techniques such as equivalent source method and nearfield acoustical holography. A field reduction example by suppressing some parts of source velocity field is shown for demonstrating the effectiveness of the method.