Just back from a fab night at a local folk club. Thinking of this thread, I saw someone get up with a cutaway guitar. Tried to figure out the % of space lost inside the body by the cutaway. I was amazed, sat there looking, how small the percentage must be. 3% perhaps (a wild guess from sight)? The cutaway sounded much bigger and bolder than the next person playing a non-cutaway. Both were decent guitars. There's much more to the sound of a guitar than whether it's cutaway - factors such as wood, bracing, string tension, action, amount of decoration on the body, depth of varnish.