Howdy Gentlemen

I am now the enormously happy owner of a RME RayDat

I currently use a couple of cheap s/pdif/coaxial ad/da converter's, you know those matchbox sized 5v no-name ones, they certainly do a decent job.

Anywho, I obviously am trying to step up to somewhat the big league, in terms of latency, fidelity, professionality etc. BUT I still want to stay relatively mobile, low power, small footprint, simple setup.. I realized a MacBook Pro wouldn't cut it for what I do, but I also don't wanna be pinned down to one location with my gear.

So, what I'm looking at is some advice from the gurus, what options (apart from the obvious such as ada8200 etc.) do I have for getting a bunch of I/O AD/DA (mostly AD is important to me) that

A: Doesn't cost an arm and a leg (that unfortunately excludes RME)
B: Takes up as little space as humanly possible

I love the features of something like the Focusrite Octopre Dynamic but it's such a deep 1U rack, not something you just throw in your bag, so as far as I can see I'll have to exclude racks and ditch the idea of built in compressor etc. also I don't really need all those extra features like phase (can do that in TotalMix) eq/low cut (can do that in Ableton), pad (never used, can turn all my gear up/down anyway), only need one analog stereo output and headphones, other analg outputs are not nessecary for now, and I could live with it strictly beind an AD box for now if that means smaller footprint.

Ideally I want as few (if any) rack gear as possible (for now) and I'm mostly going to hook up various analog keyboards and other line level things with phono out's and such, to sample or trigger via midi as part of my live instruments/performances/live recording/sound design etc. so I don't really desperately need any pre-amp before going into the RayDat for most of the inputs, actually the only pre-amping I need for now is headphones out, but I'm just using my integrated hifi-amp for that for now lol

I already have a few analog tube preamps with analog out so a small box with a bunch of analog inputs (and outputs) with good fast modern converters would be all I need in most cases, and if I'd need pre-amplifications, comp. etc. I could just throw one in front of the converter...

Please help with your suggestions

Thanks and Merry Christmas