I like DAC and streamer in one personally. The Cambridge 851N is awesome. The CXN is also nice, but not quite as nice. The Node2 is not quite in the same league: I am not an expert on Auralic.

The Cambridge CXNv2 would be my preference then. $899 currently and has great feature set and has recently been refreshed, thus the v2. It is as good if not better than any unit you will find under $1000.

The node2 is up there with the cxn. You really won’t be hearing much difference with the cyrus one. There wasn’t much in it with node 2 and cxn on my cyrus signature system. I’d look at the auralic Aries mini too which will be comparable. For this money you want a dac in the unit. You aren’t going to get much better than the Aries mini or node 2. Depends on speakers as well