There were suggestions of first extracting FLAC to WAV and then play it. I haven't tried that so far. Does anyone around here know a reasonable way of first converting FLAC to WAV before playback?
I'm on a Mac and use Max software to do those kinds of conversions. It seems you are on a PC, in which case Media Monkey should do a fine job converting FLAC to WAV (or anything else). EAC would be a good solution.
That said, I just took your suggestion, Alex, and ripped three files of a well recorded piano piece. I took the first cut from, Bach on a Steinway, and tried three different rips (none are conversions these are all direct rips from the CD). The first was a rip via iTunes to Macs uncompressed format, AIFF. The next rip was via Max to FLAC. Finally I ripped the same cut to WAV using Max. With the iTunes rip "Error Correction" was on. With the Max rips, the much more vigorous "CD Paranoia" error correction was set to "Full Paranoia". Those rips took much longer than the iTunes rip did. I listened via headphones since that would seem to really pronounce any differences pretty unmistakably. I thought the WAV and FLAC ripped with Max sounded a bit better than the AIFF via iTunes but I could not say for sure that I could identify those two every time. I did not believe I was hearing any difference between the WAV and FLAC ripped with Max. YMMV, of course. I'll try it with some other files and if the results are different I'll chime in again.