Neil Young, who has been planning on releasing an archive of all his songs and various materials which could not make it onto the convention of a vinyl or CD album, has now found a new friend in a relatively new format called Blu-ray. Blu-ray has received its biggest push via it being the media of choice of Sony’s PS3 player. Neil himself revealed the Playstation 3 as the best way to view his release, which will most likely end up being a boxset of 10 discs and it is not clear if it will be released on CD.

Blu-ray, named after the blue laser which reads the disc, has a capacity of 50 gigabytes compared to the 4.7 gigabytes of a DVD. In digital form, media now has more room to breathe with audio & video requiring no compression on the disc, which allows for a listening experience closer to the original source tapes.

Appearing at Sun Microsystem’s JavaOne conference this week, Neil spoke about the “emotional math” which is the fusion of music & technology. Sun’s Java technology enables Blu-ray discs to have very interactive menus as well as receive updates to the content via the Internet.

It’s interesting that technology is allowing digital music to come closer to capturing all the data in an analog source tape, thus making it resemble analog. From what I’ve been told, Bruce Springsteen went kicking & screaming putting his albums on CD in the 80’s. I can only imagine the fight he put up (or didn’t) when his album Devils & Dust was released only in a failed format known as DualDisc, which was a single disc with a CD layer on one side and a DVD with video content and high-resolution sound on the other. While there may have been more content on such a disc, it was notorious for not being compatible with many car CD players as well as various home CD players and CD changers. At the end of the day, people want convenience over audio quality. The MP3 explosion has proven that.

Yet there are still a handful of artists who value the sonic experience of music by putting their music out in the best form possible and are fighting against the tide. Both Neil and Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails are giving more credit to Blu-ray, with NIN releasing their two hour instrumental album, Ghosts I-IV, in a deluxe Blu-ray high resolution version.

Says Neil:

“We are trying to give them quality whether they want it or not. You can degrade it as much as you want, we just don’t want our name on it.” People are taking music and doing whatever they want with it, he said. “The laws don’t matter. These are people in their bedroom doing what they want. It’s the new radio.”

Young said you can’t be “scared or paranoid about trying to survive.” Sure, when the digital revolution came along, it was “like getting hit with icepicks.” Now, he said, the ice is tiny, maybe a little like snow.

That said, he’s clearly not a fan of MP3 quality: “Putting on a headphone and listening to MP3 is like hell,” he said.

Of course, digital and multitrack recordings in the ’80s didn’t sound so great either. The sound was shallow, he said. Now, he said, audio quality is climbing, though he still makes all his recordings in analog. “I plan to dumb my analog to the higher level so masses can enjoy it,” he said.