dac recommendations for turntable listener?

im pretty happy with how the ps audio sounds now other than the tiny bit of upper midrange sharpness that still remains.

Your very cheap interconnects are doing you no favors with this and should be the next thing you explore.  As you found with adding the Node, everything in streaming matters and matters a lot.  You should also consider adding an upgraded LPS (Teddy Pardo, etc.) to the Node at some point as it provides a nice performance boost for relatively not much $$$.  In any event, glad to hear you’re happier with your streaming performance but there is more to be had there.

mostly laptop for streaming Qobuz, I tried Qobuz via Airplay just to test the optical with something other than cd player, and I actually preferred the sound this way. however its still night and day different compared to my turntable set up, I don’t think ill be able to achieve the sound im looking for in my room by changing things like cables and transports/streamers.

I respectfully disagree — you likely won’t be able to achieve the sound you’re looking for streaming from a laptop, or at the very least it will be a significant bottleneck and your cheap interconnects aren’t doing you any favors either. These things matter significantly in streaming just like every piece in an analog setup matters. So you can spend $$$ on something like a nice Lampizator DAC, but feeding it with your current setup would be an insult and counterproductive to achieving your goal.  The fact that you and @audphile1, who has a very good streaming setup, are hearing very different results from the same DAC tells you everything you need to know here.