The CXN spec and soundwise is very good. It can act as a DAC (coax/optical in) and it has XLR balanced outputs, which are handy if go the active speakers route. It only supports Spotify Connect (not Tidal). You can plug in large external HDDs with no independent power supplies, but it takes a lot of time to load the file structure, if it's big (e.g. 2TB). Booting is also slow (1m, maybe more; my computer running linux boots faster) and the Cambridge app was sluggish, at least shortly after the unit was released.
I had a CXN as a part of a 2nd system, which I sold when I moved to another flat and replaced with a desktop system. All in all it's good, but if you don't need the XLR outputs and if you won't use the streamer as a DAC for an external source maybe the Node 2 or the Yamaha are more interesting propositions. Never heard those though.