Greetings earthlings, Yes FLAC is the way to go. J River is supposed to be the best media player but you have to pay for it - Foobar 2000 is free so I would use that one - it works and sounds just fine... For players, the Fiio X1 player is like $150 which would do the trick, they have a few higher models as well. Yes the Sony players are also supposed to be quite good. A lot of Android phones will handle FLAC no problem as well. If you're Apple all the way it's an obstacle if not you have lots of options. Good software to go CD->FLAC is called EAC - exact audio copy. Even if you just have a decent set of headphones it's worth it - memory is cheap now so you may as well have the resolution that was on the original source. Streaming is great, I've been using Tidal for awhile which is FLAC quality and they have lots of shit that I don't have but I also have tons of shit that they don't have so it's good to have both options at your fingertips.