If I rip all my CD's to flac files do I still need a CD transport?

Well you might do what I did.... I did away with my cd player years ago and gave away all my cds (hundreds) to a friend... which was good for a while. Then as years went by, I bought a Oppo DVD player to watch movies on. Then I read that you can play cds on a DVD player so I stuck an old cd I had laying around into the tray and magic came out of nowhere...... I'm now in the process of buying back the old cds that I gave away years ago. Yea sure what do you need with all those old cds.... would you like me to send you my address?

Top secret: goodwill has tons of CDs that need a good home. 

I also ripped all of my CD's with dbPoweramp after I started streaming.  I held on to my CEC TL-5 transport for another 2 years, just looking at it sitting on the rack.  I finally sold it and moved on.  All of my CD's(about 400) are on a thumb drive inserted into the streamer.  No regrets.  I just haven't been able to just give away the CD's yet, but I'm almost there.  

Maybe I am asking a dumb question, but does this depend on the quality of the CD drive used to rip?

I think that is a great question. My research led me to Exact Audio Copy as the software because it interrogates the CD drive and does not read the data as a CD player would, but rather as a data appliance. The audio CD format does not have much error correction/detection so the app reads each sector multiple times looking for consistent results. It also compares your results with previous users to identify problematic data. 

How to rip your CDs to FLAC | TechRadar