I wasn’t beeing facetious. The rooms at the Lone Star Audio Fest have concrete walls. On the one hand, this makes them very good for demonstrations as they block sound from the adjacent rooms. On the other hand, those rooms pose a problem with bass due to a combination of peaks around 30-40Hz and room gain. The A370 plate amps adjustibility along with the room treatment I brought allowed me to deal with these issues for the NX-Otica monitors and H-Frame subs.
However, the X-LS Encores I brought had too much bloom in the lower end. The bass was bloated. Danny had me plug the ports to tame that bloat. The only thing I had handy was socks. So I put a sock in each port. That tamed the bass in my room. When we took the Encores to another room that had more bass traps and had been set up for bookshelf speakers without subs, the Encores sounded better with the ports open. The socks were just low tech ports plugs.
As for flipping the ports to the front, I would think that would work. Jay did something similar with a pair of N3s. When he built them, he reversed the transmission line so the port was to the front. This would be easier to do when the cabinets are built but you could retrofit your X-SlSs by cutting 2” holes in the front baffle opposite the existing ports. Just be sure the holes are perpendicular and you don’t cut into any wiring or have anything that would interfere with the ports when installed. If your port tubes can be removed, you could put them in the new locations. Whether you use the old port tubes or new, you have to plug the old ports.
