Apple lossless as a source

Welcome.

As you probably know by now, Apple Music isn’t well supported by the audio equipment manufacturers and for good reason.  Apple’s move to better quality streaming is pretty recent.  If products haven’t yet manifested, they probably will at some point.  I only use Apple to stream through my watch when I leave my phone at home.  Quboz is what I use for streaming.  Whatever you do, go used to keep costs down.  That most likely would mean letting go of your attachment to Apple.

Yeah, I did some reading after posting this. Ridiculous how hard it is to use apple as a source.  I’m not attached to it but just made the bad assumption there would be a straightforward way of feeding it to an amp.  
if I remove the apple assumptuon, what’s a good way to get a full catalogs fed to a. Amp? Again, without spending 5000$ to do it?

Try Bluesound Node X for $749. Good stable app and streamer / DAC that offers many options to stream music.