For communication in extremely noisy environments, close-talking microphone arrays are useful. Differential microphone array systems possessing excellent nearfield directivity and strong farfield-noise reduction capability are very suitable for close-talking situations. In order to improve the focusing effect at the desired bearing in the nearfield, we propose a novel self-steering system of close-talking arrays with the first-order differential sub-arrays in this paper. Calculations of directivity patterns and directivity factors show that when a kind of optimized beamforming technique is adopted even small arrays with a focusing configuration will exhibit a satisfactory nearfield directivity which is electronically steerable within a specific range. The superiority of the proposed array system is verified by experiments with real acoustic data. For communication in extremely noisy environments, close-talking microphone arrays are useful. Differential microphone array systems possessing excellent nearfield directivity and strong farfield-noise reduction capability are very suitable for close-talking situations. In order to improve the focusing effect at the desired bearing in the nearfield, we propose a novel self-steering system of close-talking arrays with the first-order differential sub-arrays in this paper. Calculations of directivity patterns and directivity factors show that when a kind of optimized beamforming technique is adopted arrays with a focusing configuration will exhibit a satisfactory nearfield directivity which is electronically steerable within a specific range. The superiority of the proposed array system is verified by experiments with real acoustic data.