Why Acoustic Bass Guitars Suck (and How They Could Be So Much Better)

A bassist's field guide to the physics, the psychoacoustics, and the fifty-year design mistake nobody wants to talk about. 
I have spent my entire adult life looking for one thing: an instrument I can easily carry on my back, walk into any room, unzip from its case and make the paintings on the wall rattle. No amp. No cable. No Cord. An truly acoustic stringed bass instrument.
Not a bass that implies bass. Not an instrument that uses the same finger techniques and positions as an electric bass so you can pretend to play the right notes while the guitar player drowns you. No. I needed an instrument that does the actual job of a bass, which is to hold the ONE — the root, the tonic, the low fundamental that tells every other instrument where home is — and to do it with enough physical authority that people feel it in their chest before they hear it in their ears.
The upright bass does this. It also weighs as much as a refrigerator, barely fits in a car, and requires you to plan your whole life around getting it through doorways.
The Mexican guitarrón does this —marvelously —that’s why I have played it for nearly two decades. It's the loudest portable unamplified bass instrument I have ever stood next to, and I've stood next to a lot of them. I’ll have much more to say on this underutilized instrument later.
And then there is the acoustic bass guitar. The thing that looks like a dreadnought that ate a P-Bass. You know, acoustic guitar body but with four strings. The thing that has been sold to hopeful bassists since 1972 with the promise of "acoustic bass" in the name. The thing that, with vanishingly few exceptions, produces a sound I can only describe as clicky clacky stringy brassy bright. Thin. Hollow. Quiet. Everything a bass is not.
For decades we bassists have just accepted the conventional wisdom. That an acoustic bass guitar: meaning an instrument that played like an electric bass —was impossible. We all believed that building one that actually functioned — meaning loud and deep enough to hang with a few guitars, fiddles, and mandolins around a campfire or Irish pub. And maybe keeping up with a polite banjo player at a bluegrass jam could not be done.
It’s just physics we were told. The body just can’t be big enough... huge bodied versions like the Taylor AB series and the Tacoma Thunderchief still failed the campfire test by any honest accounting. So everyone pretty much gave up. A few intrepid builders kept trying: Furch, Mottola, but if were honest...they still dont sound like a bass. 
Stringy. Brassy. Tight. Click. Clang. Rattle. Bright. P
Fret buzz.. String noise... perhaps some midrange cut.
Sparkle yes.

But Bass?   No.
I want to explain why. Not with vibes. With physics. And then I want to tell you how to build one that doesn't suck, because the answer turns out to be sitting in plain sight, and it's been sitting there since the sixteenth century.
Fair warning: I'm going to define some terms as we go, because you can't understand why these things fail without understanding a handful of concepts that instrument makers know and almost nobody explains to players. I'll keep it painless. Mostly.