Now that I have super duper Bose headphones I can now hear all the hissing and crackling from the mp3's on my i-pod.

Are there any portable devices that play flac files out there?

The iPod can play .wav files and Apple Lossless.

Cown X5L ... 35 hour battery life as well.

Most Cowon players support FLAC ... and their sound quality is primo to boot.

cheers, thanks for that.

probably nothing to do with mp3. more to do with dirty CDs when ripping.
Try ripping via 'analogue' if your CD player has its analogue cable connected

Anything that runs the Rockbox firmware.

www.rockbox.org