It has every media component you could want, and they're all married together in a platform. That means other artists could use it, other record companies could use it and gain the knowledge of our 15-year development curve.

If you doubt the man's seriousness about screwing around with technology, check out this live 1982 performance of the vocoder-driven "Sample and Hold." See? Those old analog vocoders beat the pants off T-Pain's digital auto-tuner. At the JavaOne conference, Young eagerly extolled the virtues of the entertainment industry's production standard of 96kHz, 24-bit digital audio.

Why do golden-ear types like Young hate MP3s? The format results in lower dynamic range, lossy compression artifacts and is thin in the upper frequencies. Digital audio also produces harsh even-order harmonics and not the odd-order harmonics which add textural timbre to chords, and integrated circuit amplifiers have a high noise floor because of radio-frequency interference. Even young consumers prefer the sound of analog hi-fi systems like Jackson Pollock's. (Photo by Andrea Barsanti)

Young used his time on stage during the keynote to show off a 10-disc Blu-Ray project that included almost every song he'd ever recorded, in chronological order. Sun's role? In providing Sony the Java code that allows for interactive features on Blu-ray. Young said that while he'd been working on the project for 15 years, only now was the digital audio quality up to standard. Each track had visual accompaniment from the relevant era. When a recording from the compact disc era appeared, he joked "We took a giant dump at this point." He also mentioned that he was working to create a car that didn't require stops for refueling, which also has some tangential relationship to Java, showing off an American mid-century model he's entering in the automotive X-Prize challenge.

Interestingly enough, us bloggers with our hair-trigger deadlines were given first crack at asking questions of Young (and indulging in the complimentary fruit plate), while the print reporters with their leisurely deadlines had to wait outside. As we waited for Young and his entourage to arrive, O'Reilly Media founder Tim O'Reilly showed off his Livescribe pen for recording audio in time with written notes to News.com editor-in-chief Dan Farber, who remarked sagely about the need for special Livescribe paper, "So they're selling the razors and the blades." But the two quickly went into fanboy mode when Young arrived, peppering the man with questions before anyone else could get a word in edgewise.

The car project, part of a documentary Young's working on with filmmaker Larry Johnson, a longtime collaborator, seems to be a bit of a lark. He wants to create a superefficient car that doesn't need to stop for gas or electricity, and he wants it to be heavy. While I might have gotten a C+ in college physics, it's enough to know that you can't run a Lincoln Continental on unicorns and rainbows. "It's very kooky. When you try to do something like this, people say you're nuts." Wonder why?

I mostly went on behalf of my father, who's pretty much a superfan (to the point where, besides the mutton-chop sideburns and dark glasses, he and Young seem to have identical fashion sense). My question had to do with the fact that my father had already bought Young's work on vinyl, then again on CD, and will now probably buy it all over again on Blu-ray in the fall. "I think it's the same as Microsoft selling the same applications every year with new bells and whistles." He then made this vinyl collector very happy by lambasting the quality of digital audio, and saying that he still records and edits everything in analog.

Young was at his best when he pierced through the Sun marketing hype of the morning. When O'Reilly asked how the musician felt about the "free" aspects of Sun's open-source efforts with Java, Young veered well of the "Keep on rockin' in a free world" tagline I assume Sun paid dearly for: "The free aspect... I think that's a word, that's a marketing thing." Touché.

EA has the rights to make digital copies of Hasbro games, of which it announced a slew this morning. It's also stepping into Scrabulous's ultrapopular arena. As EA Hasbro general manager Chip Lange told me late last week, Electronic Arts wants to get each Hasbro title onto as many platforms as possible. Even if that means sticking us with more useless application requests from friends.