The Lowdown
Magma’s Solid Blaze Pack 80 is the smallest in this range but still big enough to carry plenty of essentials, including leads, headphones, microphone, modular controllers, and day-to-day gear to your gigs. It’s durable, comfortable, and looks like it’ll last forever. Recommended.
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Video Review
First Impressions / Setting up
The Magma Solid Blaze Pack 80 is a traditional-looking urban backpack in understated black. Despite having the Magma and Solid Blaze logos on its attached accessories, it remains discreet, which is just how I think DJ bags should be.
It has two comfortable padded shoulder straps and a clip between the two for stabilising heavier weights. Everything, of course, is easily adjustable. With left and right shoulder blade and middle back padding under webbing, plus padding elsewhere where it matters, it feels snug and secure. There’s a useful handle at the top for carrying it when not on your back.
Two main zip compartments offer various amounts of room for a laptop and iPad, headphones, leads, and smaller items in elasticated pockets of various types. With three internal zip pockets, there’s plenty of room to hide things away too. It also benefits from a single external zip pocket on the front flap, which is nice and deep, giving you more options for stashing your gear.
There’s no external meshing for drinks, so they will have to go inside the main compartment. On the plus side, though, that just adds to the streamlined look and feel of the bag.
In Use
I’ve been using this for a while now to carry my kit to my boutique 45s disco, which is a little thing I’ve been doing for fun recently.
It’s perfect for that because I’m obviously bringing my record decks and vinyl in their own boxes, and so this bag is for everything else.
If you do need to carry a controller, maybe control vinyl, and larger items like that, you’ll probably be looking up the range to one of the bigger bags – you can just about squeeze control vinyl in here, but I’d rather not.
But if, like me, it’s more about your essential accessories, backup leads, power supplies, food, drink, and that kind of thing, this bag’s absolutely perfect.
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It would also double up as a great day-to-day bag if you’re the kind of person that prefers to have lots of pockets and compartments rather than one big compartment in your daily life.
It’s been out in the rain, and it fared just fine. Apparently it has “a water-repellent RPET 900D shell and YKK AquaGuard zippers” – we’ll just take their word for that!
Conclusion
Magma is one of the bag companies that we’ve always supported at Digital DJ Tips, frankly because they’re cool!
And this bag continues that tradition with lots of recycled materials (the “80” in its name refers to the number of recycled bottles used in its construction), a nice minimal design, and the kind of practicalities that have clearly been added by people who know what DJs, travelling musicians, digital nomads, and so on, look for.
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There’s just enough padding without it being too much, and just enough branding for you to feel good about the bag without it looking conspicuous or garish.
In short, recommended… but do look up the range if you need to carry more gear, because by design, the capacity of this bag is quite limited.
