ultimate compact travel system

"Ultimate"? I'd drop the Micropods for the a paif of small Dynaudio self-powered BM5a monitors, which would eliminate the need for the amp. If you really wanted to go "Ultimate" at that point you could take the digital signal out of the ipod with an MSB iLink, and top it all off with a good, small DAC. If you used a USB DAC like an Apogee, Grace or a Benchmark (the latter not being too small) you'd also have the option of using files off your laptop hard drive. That would obviously be an alternative to your iPod in the first place. Well...you said "Ultimate". You could probably get a nice Pelican case to fit all the pieces too. Bon voyage!

I have the Dynaudios and they may be a tad bigger than you realize Jax2. It looks like Celtic66 wants a 5.1 system anyway and he already owns the Micropods. You would need $4000 worth of Pelican cases to just transport a 5.1 Dynaudio system. Now if you were talkin'a 2.0 system then 2 Dynaudios, a Macbook & a firewire audio interface would be the ticket. You wouldn't even need to transport cd's if you rip 'em into iTunes.