Are you prepared to properly start a Plex server?

Is there a way to force Plex to transcode particular audio-only files while playing remotely? It appears that it will transcode FLAC files to AAC if they're above a particular bitrate. e.g., stuff ...

Hardware transcoding unlike software transcoding, relies on the server’s CPU to convert media files into different formats, hardware transcoding offloads this intensive task to a dedicated component ...