I'm not a luthier. But I can't help but notice that my three main guitars, the ones I really play, have scalloped braces. I also have a dread with tapered X and scalloped tonebars (is that the name for the smaller braces,
in the lower half of the top?) and a large jumbo with straight, but fairly low, braces (the builder swears by them) and a rosewood bridgeplate.
The quality I notice in my scalloped-braced guitars (and the two HD-28's I used to own) is not so much a louder bass, but greater clarity and transparency in the bass, e.g., playing chords in succession you hear the movement in the bass more clearly. In two of the instruments the builder (same guy) scalloped pretty deeply to balance the influence of a very stiff top.
The tapered-braced dread has much better sustain than most dreads I've played, but it's not particularly well-balanced.
All these instruments are much more mellow-sounding than the straight-braced Jumbo. But the difference could be expalined in many ways, e.g., the Jumbo is in Koa, the other guitars are rosewood (Braz and EIR)+Sitka and Curly Maple+Engelmann.
At least in the late 70's and early 80's to my ears there was a huge difference in quality between scalloped-braced and straight-braced Martin Dreadnoughts.
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