Neil Young has slammed the iPod and iTunes for effectively dumbing down recorded music by reducing sound quality to a point too far to bear.

Dismissing the Apple solutions as being no more than “Fisher Price toys”, he told Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech Conference: “Apple has taken a detour down the convenience highway. Quality has taken a complete backseat – if it even gets in the car at all.”

In a plea for the launch of uncompressed music sales online – made available at much higher quality than the de facto sub-200k standard offered by most download services, including iTunes, he said,”We have beautiful computers now but high-resolution music is one of the missing elements,” he observed.

His complaints echo those made here by UK electronic music pioneer, Toby Marks (Banco De Gaia), who told me: “I absolutely hate the fact that it’s possible to release music at the same quality it was created, yet the market has moved backward to something that’s little better than cassettes.”

A technologist himself, Young intends releasing a multimedia archive of his entire career on Blu-ray later this year.