Neil Young: Rock’n’roll saint or one of the craziest people to ever strap on a guitar? I’ve been a fan of Young’s music from his rise to fame with Buffalo Springfield right up to the present day, a span of more than 40 years. And I think a case could be made either way for him.

But how many other artists have sustained such a long creative career? How many others are still putting out new albums that alternately entrance and infuriate well into their 60s? You can count them on the fingers of your hands (and you probably won’t need to use your toes). And how many recording artists can lay claim to having recorded in so many different genres that they were actually sued by their own record company for making albums that didn’t sound anything like their other records? Young’s career has spanned rock, folk, country, punk, electronic, grunge, soul and industrial. His back-up bands have included Pearl Jam and Booker T & the MG’s, not to forget Crazy Horse and the Stray Gators and 1991 he released a live album that contained little more than guitar feedback.

Young’s been talking about doing a comprehensive career retrospective, which he called Archives, for 20 years. As the years went on and Archives didn’t appear, it became something of a running joke, how could it take Young so damned long to string together a bunch of old songs and let us at them?

Young decided to whet our appetites or to torture us (depending on your point of view) in 2006 when he started releasing a series of concert recordings from his vaults, starting with the 1970 Live at Fillmore East with Crazy Horse. Two more followed until, at the end of last year, word went out that the fabled Archives series would actually be available soon.

As details of the boxed set emerged, I wondered if Young was still in possession of all his senses. We know that he hates compact discs, feeling that the technology’s limitations made it inferior to analogue. And while he is technically correct, it seemed as if he didn’t realize that to coax the best sound from a vinyl album, you basically need Neil Young millions to spend on a system. And don’t even get him started on MP3s, something that he seems to hate even more than having to record a second take in the studio.

Be that as it may, Young does give Blu-Ray discs the seal of approval for their uncompressed audio. And Blu-Ray’s interactive features, including web connectivity, apparently meant that he could finally release an Archives set that would live up to his exacting standards.

And so, at the height of the worst global economy in almost 100 years, he announced plans to release a 10-disc Blu Ray box to sell for US$450, that there might be a standard DVD version but no CD or MP3 version. We also found out that this was to be just Archives Volume 1, covering the first 10 years of Young’s career, and leaving us with the prospect of three or four similarly high-priced volumes in the future.

At some point sanity finally prevailed and the set was released last month on CD, DVD and Blu Ray versions – the list price for the Blu Ray set reduced to $350 – and even digital downloads on iTunes and Amazon. The reduced price, advance reviews and a 32% discount at Amazon convinced me to go for the Blu-Ray edition.

So what do you get? In the eight-disc CD boxed set, you get 116 songs that span the years from Neil Young’s start as a teenager trying to make it in the Toronto music scene in 1963 through to the Harvest album. Two of the discs in the box are the previously released Fillmore East and Massey Hall sets, which most people who would buy this box have probably already purchased. Aside from that first disc of Young’s early days, the majority of the previously unreleased material consists of alternate mixes and live versions of songs you already know. And the reason for that is that Young has always gone back in time to raid his songwriter’s closet to come up with enough tracks to fill out albums. So it’s possible there just aren’t that many songs he hasn’t released in one form or another.

The DVD and Blu-Ray sets add in two extra discs, one of which represents the first legal release of Young’s film Journey Through the Past, a film that is about one-third wonderful performance footage and two-thirds stuff that must have seemed like a really good idea when everyone was totally stoned. The 10th disc is a previously unreleased concert from the Riverboat club in Toronto in 1969. So that adds up to a total of 125 songs and an additional 12 “hidden” songs. The box also contains a 200+ page book bound in fake leather with detailed credits and hundreds of photos, a relatively useless poster, a plastic card with a unique serial number on it (allowing you to download the MP3 versions of the songs for free) and, most bizarrely, a sleeve containing the CD and DVD of the previously released Live at Canterbury House set.

Well, first and foremost, let’s talk about the music. The sonic differences between the original CDs and the versions in this set are huge and unsubtle – you can even hear the differences when playing the MP3s (something I’m sure Young would hate to admit). If the original CDs sounded like you were buried alive in a cave-in and listening to a concert five miles away, the new set is the equivalent of getting front row seats in heaven.

You open a “file cabinet” onscreen and a drawer slides out, filled with a “file folder” for each song. If you’re listening and watching on Blu-Ray, you can browse this material while the song is playing. (Presumably for the DVD you can only view this stuff as bonus features after the song completes.) A veritable treasure trove of ephemera – lyric sheets, photos, album covers, press clippings – comes along with each song. For some, you also get audio clips of commercials and interviews and for even fewer songs, video clips from TV and film appearances. More items are hidden away on the “Time Line” section of each disc, marked with little push pins that you can click on, and that’s where the Blu-Ray Live aspect comes in – my player has already downloaded at least one new track from the internet and more are promised.

Honestly, I wanted to hate this. I wanted to rant about all this unnecessary extravagance in what should be austere times. But I can’t bring myself to, because Neil Young (or his people) have honestly rethought what a career retrospective boxed set can and should be. On Blu-Ray, it’s a truly immersive experience that no other musical retrospective even comes close to matching. Each disc may only contain an hour or so of music, but with so many bonus features, you can spend a couple of hours with it. The only real complaint I can work up is about how the box includes those concerts I’d already bought just a year or two ago, rather than using the space for different shows.

True, you may only look at some of this stuff once. And many will say that it would have worked equally well served up in a large format book rather than on disc – but the aesthetic would have been completely different and I find I’m enjoying the experience far more than I expected.

I was going to recommend that the average fan interested in this set save $100 on the DVD version. But for whatever reason, as I’m writing this, the DVD box is actually selling for $10 more than the Blu-Ray box on Amazon.

Now that Volume 1 is with us, the templates have been set and the software written, hopefully the future volumes will be months and not decades away. Volume 2 will include one certified masterpiece – Tonight’s the Night – as well as Zuma, On the Beach, Comes a Time and the start of his “difficult” years at Geffen. And I’ll be first on line to buy that – presuming I’m still alive when it comes out.