Not a BeoSound 5 user myself, but it seems as if your dealer isn't correct. You can store music in WAV format, and play that back. The disadvantage is that WAV is uncompressed LPCM (such as found on a CD), and therefore really eats hardware space and processing capability. Apple Lossless is identical to the CD, but compressed compared to WAV and from 40-60% of the file size of the latter.
For some reason, B&O chose Windows XPE with a skin for BeoSound 5 (previously having used embedded Linux), which is why BeoSound 5 is heavily tilted towards the Windows universe of compatible formats.
Here are the supported formats: WMA, WMA lossless, MP3, WAV, ASF, AAC
BTW - while one will hunt both high and low for good spec's in the user guide or on the website, here's a nice link:
http://www.windowsfordevices.com/news/NS3950097928.html
Windows users who need a good program that will hunt for album art efficiently might like this one:
http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Foobar2000:Components_0.9/AlbumArtDownloader_XUI