My real question is will I see any type of benefit out of this when playing through my Stereo. Or does this require a compatible reciever and additional speakers?
It's ALAC so it's been around for years and years. Any Apple device should be able to decode. Even Win10 has native support for the format now.
edit: AirPlay actually streams all audio in 16/44 ALAC, regardless of source codec, so there should be zero issue supporting Lossless on pretty much every AirPlay-compatible endpoint I can think of.