Bluesound Node 2i vs Upscale streamers

I have a Node 2, an Aurender N100H, and an Auralic Aries G2 in three separate systems.  But, I’ve also compared them directly.  What do they do differently?  Sense of space mostly.  The Bluesound as a streamer into the same DAC sounds “flat” front to back and side to side in comparison to the other units.  There’s more information too. The Node is a terrific value, but the better units offer more resolution and more sense of space.  Tonally, they’ll sound the same, as you would expect, but the better units are offering the data with less jitter, and less noise perceived as a lack of resolution.  My DAC is decent, not great, but certainly better than average - and it rejects jitter well.  But, it’s pretty clear that a better bitstream will result in a better sound.  
Best,

Candidly, I’m skeptical of claims by manufacturers that a DAC is immune to jitter.  And, there is more to a streamer than just jitter reduction. There is convenience certainly, but also reduction of noise infiltrating the system.  I don’t mean noise in the sense of things like “hiss” or distortion, but noise in the sense of obscuring details.  For example, I compared my Aurender against a dedicated, souped up Mac mini (solid state drive, 16 GB RAM, everything else turned off and/or optimized in every way).  The Aurender smoked it. No contest.  BTW: both were outputting via USB to the DAC.  I got the same result when I converted the Mac mini USB to SPDIF through a nice converter to isolate it.  
I think the only way for you to find out if this is the way to go is to try one.  Plenty of companies/stores will let you demo them or buy with a solid return policy.  Try one.  If it doesn’t do what you want/need, return it.  My suspicion is that you’ll probably like what you hear.