Are all streamers the same?

I have a room correction device from shm . In addition to the basic Dirac RC I bought a unit that for an extra $109 threw in a streamer. I’ve since compared it to the Node, Bryston BDP-3, Melco N 100, and Cambridge CXN 60.

The Dirac is fine but the enclosed streamer is awful.

In general I have found that as one ascends the price ladder in streaming the better things get. For me the sweet spot are the CA and the Melco in terms of performance and price. The Bryston as a tad better but cost several times more and the software package was unusable

The only thing that sounds the same in the audiophile world is the sound of a tree falling in the forest when there's no one there to hear it.

The best approach is to only buy audio products that have been objectively measured by the manufacturer with the results made public (Schiit, etc.) or have been carefully measured by folks like ASR or Audioholics or a few others. That way you can escape from your cave of uncertainty about your own hearing or limited knowledge about science and engineering using expert advice that brings about a Xanadu of confidence in the performance of your equipment, and so will you rise into the nirvana of audio bliss. 

If you mean dramatically overpriced, then yes.

I run a micro PC I got from Amazon for $130 and run Ubuntu Linux (free) on it.  The free clementine music manager looks a lot like iTunes, but I mostly run JRiver ($30).  I can stream music from the Internet, but I mostly just play things from my collection.  Iʻve ripped all of my CDs and have begun ripping my records to digital.  My system sounds great.

Some have nicer displays.

On a more serious note, I think the conversation has to be split between servers and such and the device that is actually connected to the DAC (or has the DAC in it). 

For example, Roon recommends one box acting as the server, decoding the audio, doing DSP, running the user interface, etc., and a separate, much quieter box that only takes the decoded audio stream from the network and passes it to the DAC.