Although I can't offer an answer to the question about MD emphasis,
here's a little general info about emphasis.
When digital audio became avaiable in the early '80s with the advent
of Sony's PCM-F1 and the Sansui and Technics equipment, emphasis
was almost universally used to overcome the small distortion introduced
by the (comparitively) primative A/D and D/A circuits of the time. It did
so by boosting the high frequencies before recording and rolling them off
slighly during playback. Since most of the distortion components are at
higher frequencies, the rolloff would tend to reduce distorition created
by the recording process.
In digital audio systems of the era, including the emerging CD standard
and the S/PDIF interconnect standard, an emphasis flag was used to
mark recordings so that during playback, the filter could be selected or
deselected automatically, unlike the Dolby noise reduction that was used
on analog cassettes (Dolby required the user to manually select during
playback, and most users got it wrong).
Although emphasis, in theory, is good for digital recordings because it
does reduce distortion, even that of modern A/D and D/A, it fell out
of favor in the early days of compact discs because the early players
used de-emphasis filters that were often somewhat inaccurate. The
masterning engineer, when faced with the decision of whether to
use emphasis or not, often opted not to use it, feeling that the slight
increase in distortion was better than the (possible) inaccurate
frequency response of the de-emphasis filter in the player. Even
though modern CD players have very accurate digital de-emphasis
(usually applied by the oversampling circuit), the stigma left by the
inacurracy of the early analog filters remains, and so almost all CDs
are recorded without emphasis.
I looked at the MD chapter of Ken Pohlmann's book, and he does
not mention emphasis. Although I can't imagine not having selectable
emphasis as part of a digital recording system that is supposed to
interoperate with other consumer digital audio systems, maybe due
to the scarcity of commercial recordings with emphasis, it simply
fell by the wayside.
I have noticed that computer audio seems to ignore emphasis. When
I ripped a track from a CD with emphasis to a WAV file, the resulting
playback was uncorrected and with no de-emphasis, resulting in an
unnaturally "bright" sound.
I'd welcome CoolEdit FFT settings for adding/removing emphasis.
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