wseaton
Aquarium Advice Activist
Whoa, didn't mean to start a fist fight here 
By 'anechoic' in my original post I meant 'isolated' or essentially biologically dampened, just like sound is an anechoic room. Perhaps a bad metaphor.
Having a bunch of live rock in an empty tank doesn't seem a lot different than live sand in an air tight bag to me initially becuase you have no higher organisms producing waste to start the nitrogen cycle, hence starving bacteria that are a big reason for buying LR in the first place. However, the cure process and decay of maturing rock would seem to feed this, so your explanation seems pretty sound.
As for LS, the only benefit I can see is bagged LS tends to produce much less of a mess when added to a tank. It settles quicker and doesn't cloud up as badly as raw sand such as ooltic when stirred up. That's about all the marketing I'll buy on that one, and consider the rest BS.
The DSB issue is one I simply can't buy 100%. Brownian motion or whatever, I have trouble believing that water penetrates into dense sand more than a few inches at a rate that would affect nitrate break-down. I'm currently experimenting with this by running some 1" PVC plumbing through a DSB on one of my tank and running a slow trickle through it to produce some slow and steady current flow. Essentially a nitrate coil, but using the DSB instead of the coil, but same concept. The proble is this tank doesn't have Nitrate problems to begin with, so it's going to be tough to make a call.
By 'anechoic' in my original post I meant 'isolated' or essentially biologically dampened, just like sound is an anechoic room. Perhaps a bad metaphor.
Having a bunch of live rock in an empty tank doesn't seem a lot different than live sand in an air tight bag to me initially becuase you have no higher organisms producing waste to start the nitrogen cycle, hence starving bacteria that are a big reason for buying LR in the first place. However, the cure process and decay of maturing rock would seem to feed this, so your explanation seems pretty sound.
As for LS, the only benefit I can see is bagged LS tends to produce much less of a mess when added to a tank. It settles quicker and doesn't cloud up as badly as raw sand such as ooltic when stirred up. That's about all the marketing I'll buy on that one, and consider the rest BS.
The DSB issue is one I simply can't buy 100%. Brownian motion or whatever, I have trouble believing that water penetrates into dense sand more than a few inches at a rate that would affect nitrate break-down. I'm currently experimenting with this by running some 1" PVC plumbing through a DSB on one of my tank and running a slow trickle through it to produce some slow and steady current flow. Essentially a nitrate coil, but using the DSB instead of the coil, but same concept. The proble is this tank doesn't have Nitrate problems to begin with, so it's going to be tough to make a call.
