Point of higher priced streamer?

It’s called expectation bias.   I saw a good friend show himself up in front of a room full of guys comparing his £6000 mains cable Vs a £3.50 kettle lead.
The lad doing the switching had double bluffed.   My mate was claiming “night & day, you’re all deaf”.    Embarrassing

I've experienced utter dismay on the part of cable salesmen when I've proven to them their product doesn't deliver. I've also been pleasantly surprised by actual improvements with very expensive, high end cables, but those experiences are rare and only happen when the entire system is thought out. I've also experienced expensive cables work well with certain components while sounding like total trash with others. Some products simply sound better with the manufacturer supplied leads - they engineered it that way after all. 

It's possible your friend has heard such an improvement with this particular cable in his own system that he never bothered to consider it may not always provide such an improvement when used in a different scenario - and I wouldn't be surprised if it could very well sound/perform worse.
 
Too many of the high end power cables have issues connecting to mains supplies properly (I'm speaking of a proper grip with the connectors on the outlet itself) that it's pointless to upgrade the cable if you don't also upgrade the mains outlet to a receptacle that can support the type of "hospital grade" connectors many of those cables feature. 

At the end of the day the guys who typically spend a lot on cables have either already maxed their respective budget with the rest of their system components and are having a bit of fun, are trying to compensate for a flaw present within the system because it wasn't set up properly to begin with, or have had an experience with someone who can properly demonstrate, implement, and prescribe the correct cable pairing for the application. The last is quite possibly a unicorn in this hobby!

Maybe I missed it, but one thing missing in a lot of streaming/ external DAC discussions is buffers.  The data signal processing is not like a telegraph that goes straight from signal to output.  The data is assembled in buffers, whether in a PC, Mac, Streamer, or DAC, and then fed to either the next buffer or the final internal processing within the unit. So the transfer is much closer to transferring a Word file, which USB can do all day without errors. This is not to say there aren't difference, but it makes the issue more puzzling. I just think we err in thinking of the data transfer as a finely tuned triple-play in baseball where timing is everything, and a pause is fatal.

Perhaps the issue is the resulting blackness of the background from which the music emerges.  We can think we know black until we encounter blacker, so perhaps the noise is not distortion of signal but a graying of the background.

Just wild speculation.

Larry this begs to know did u run the external dac from the node?

As discussed previously the node is a very poor digital transport compred to a dedicated high server lika an lumin innous 432 evo and you must run usb to get the Best out of a dac only usb ofers asyncronous data transfer which cits down on zransmittteed jitter

We are specialsts in this area we have sold and tested most brands of streamers

Dave and troy
Audio intellect nj

@paulcreed not sure what you mean with 'noisy', but, ime, some systems pick up noise originating from the MacBook wall wart power supply. Good conditioners (Furman, Shunyata in my case) reject this noise entirely. You can also run the MacBook for many hours of battery power alone (no audible difference in my case, but if that wall wart causes trouble ...) Of course you don't want any other applications like messaging, email etc. run on that macbook.
Re soundstage: Roon seems to provide for perfect time domain control of the digital data stream, and, again, ime, imaging is superb. Somebody else here stated that they prefer wired ethernet connection over Wi-Fi. Again, I believe this depends on the quality of your home Wi-Fi system. Multi-channel mesh systems have very high capacity, no drop outs, etc. and, again, in my experience, streaming from a MacBook via Roon to an OPPO 205, with the MacBook receiving signal via WiFi and sending signal to the OPPO via WiFi, sounds superior to any variation of one or both digital connections by ethernet cable. In the end, Ethernet cables are not that well shielded and you would expect some RFI/EMI contamination of the unit they are connected too, but that is speculation on my side. WiFi of course provides for complete electrical isolation.

you must run usb to get the Best out of a dac only usb ofers asyncronous data transfer which cits down on zransmittteed jitter

Actually this is not entirely true. While most do, some DACs do not use Asynchronous USB, but isosynchronous; also not all DACs sound better from a USB connection depending on how the grounding and power rails for the USB interface have been implemented with the rest of the DAC board, not to mention variations in the source of the USB stream.

There are plenty of DACs with SPDIF/BNC/AES inputs, which when matched with a properly clocked (low-jitter) SPDIF output, will perform better with the same files compared to a USB delivery. It really depends on the DAC and application.