I have ordered a PWT and am anxiously awaiting its arrival. I will connect it to the PWD MKII. I have been in the habit of buying gold cd’s when possible, with the understanding that the gold sprays on more evenly and makes it easier for the transport to accurately read the disc. Knowing that the PWT will read a disc for a long as is needed to get a bit-perfect reading of the data before transferring it to memory for playback, and knowing that actual playback happens from the memory rather than the disc, I am wondering if there is any benefit to using gold cd’s with the PWT.
If you like the SQ Improvements of Gold cds, SHM-cds and Platinum SHM then you will benefit from these improvements more with a PWT.
Theoretically it should make no difference.
I have played around a bit with different CDs, burning copies of CDs and comparing with the original, etc. and was unable to discern a difference when played on the PWT.
I then stopped thinking about it. 
Most of the time, in my experience gold CDs come from companies that have remastered the album. I have gold CDs from DCC, MFSL, and Analogue Productions.
Whether the gold CD adds to the quality, not sure, but the remastering is where the real improvement is. XRCDs are not gold, but the attention to detail and their technology makes for a better product.
Your gold CDs will sound better on any quality transport, compared to the original release.
Yes, one needs to compare the same mastering to make a determination whether a physical format makes any difference.
One of the most vivid examples in my mind was at a “grand opening” for a local audio store. One vendor brought two CDR’s of the same exact bits (a bootleg recording of The Count Basie Orchestra if I recall correctly) - while the first was played people kept talking and milling around. When the 2nd was played the room grew quiet and people turned toward the system and started tapping their feet. The vendor told me that she just wanted to see if the “minimize jitter” setting in the burning software made a difference
Great fun.
Why would CD burning software offer a choice of lower jitter? That doesn’t make sense unless you are making CD’s for your enemies!
I didn’t get from her a clear description of what that option did, nor could I get a good idea of which software she was running. For argument sake if writing at 8x (or higher) was the normal mode and a 1x or 1/2x was the low jitter mode one could see why you’d want it as an option. Similarly if the low jitter mode couldn’t deal with multiple sessions, etc. I’m just making these examples up. For all I know she was beta-ing a new option in someone’s software that’s now standard… (This was maybe 15 years ago?)
Years ago I determined CD’s burned at one-half of a drive’s actual real-world maximum burning speed exhibited fewer C1 errors, and typically no C2 or CU errors. Burning faster or slower resulted in a lower quality burn.
The differences formerly exhibited with differing burning speeds is now much less, but it can still make a difference.