Ketchikan, Alaska (October 26, 2026)—Rick Camp put his particular set of skills to good use earlier this year on a project that began as a straightforward scoring job for a short adventure film but soon mushroomed to include all the audio plus the integration of a unique Next Gen AV Designs/George Augspurger-designed immersive sound system at a special venue in Alaska.
Camp wears many hats. A Berklee College-trained musician, he has been a front-of-house mixer for the likes of Earth Wind and Fire, Beyoncé, Destiny’s Child, J.Lo and others over the past 40 years. He also owns Master Mix Live, a Dolby Atmos 9.1.4 music facility in Las Vegas, Nev., and, through his Next Gen A/V Designs company, designs, supplies and integrates music production studios and houses of worship.
Camp has also been developing a multisensory entertainment project that he plans to produce in Las Vegas, for which he had purchased a set of motion control seats. When the manufacturer asked him to demo the seats to a prospective customer, Camp put on a dog-and-pony show, with wrap-around LED screens and 9.1.4 Dolby Atmos immersive sound. The customer was sold— and then asked Camp to score the film at the center of the project, a 4D adventure featuring the Alaskan landscape, complete with snow, wind, mist and immersive sound.
Dubbed SEAMAX Alaska and marketed with the tagline, “This isn’t just a film—it’s a full-body adventure,” the experience is hosted at a 50-yearold former movie house in Ketchikan, one of the state’s main cruise ship hubs. Nearly 60 cruise ships carrying 1.6 million passengers are expected to pass through the city—which has a permanent population of just over 8,000—this season.
THEY CAME FOR THE MUSIC
To create the main score, Camp brought in Thomas Dawson, Jr., his longtime music production partner and MD for the Commodores for the last three decades, who works out of his recording studio in Colorado Springs, Colo. Their roles soon expanded to include Foley and sound design for the film, to accompany the images of the Denali mountains, ice caves, whitewater rafting, dog sledding and wildlife.
For Camp, who has been living in Las Vegas for years, Alaska was a shock. “Oh my God— snow and trees and cold,” he laughs. “I went up there to see the theater and the old JBL system they inherited. It had been a working theater, but I tested the speakers and they were just tired.”
The new owners had planned to use the JBL rig but reluctantly agreed that the main theater was going to need an upgrade and decided to move the old system to a second theater in the building. Then, only weeks before the tourist season was to kick off, Camp discovered that none of his usual go-to manufacturers could deliver in time. “So I called George Augspurger,” he says matter of factly. “He did his homework, and he designed a 9.1.4 cinema rig.”
THEY STAYED FOR THE SOUND
The five front-wall speakers, installed behind the 40-by-20-foot screen, each feature dual 15-inch Beyma woofers with a 2-inch TAD compression driver on one of Augspurger’s iconic horn lenses, driven by ten 1,000-watt Powersoft Unica 8K8 amp channels in a bi-amplified configuration.
A pair of double-18-inch subs are driven by four 1000-watt Powersoft amp channels. The custom-designed Augspurger surround side, rear and ceiling units feature a Beyma single 12-inch with a 1-inch concentric compression driver powered in full-range mode by ten more 1,000-watt channels of Powersoft amplification.
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Camp reports that, in total, the one-of-a-kind Augspurger cinema system delivers 24,000W from 30 Hz to 20 kHz with an SPL of 140 dB to the 80-seat theater. Not every speaker went to Alaska: “I figured I might as well buy a pair of double-15s, too,” he chuckles.
Sonny Maupin, owner of Las Vegas sound company New World Audio, directed Camp to local wood and paint shops; he also handled quality control and integrated the components into the boxes. “The music, Foley and the speaker boxes all came together at the same time,” Camp says, “but I didn’t really have time to test them before they had to go on a truck to Seattle, then get on a barge to Ketchikan.”
Camp then spent a couple of weeks installing everything and doing the final music mixes onsite, having premixed the soundtrack at Master Mix Live on his SSL System T S300 console. He headed back to Las Vegas briefly, returning with new diaphragms and other components to refurbish the second theater’s JBL system and upgrade it to 7.1.4, and to implement the complex audio routing for the two movie theaters, along with a pre-show entry room.
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The routing scheme—a design collaboration between Camp and Sebastian Pallisso-Poux, formerly of Dolby and now with Spatial Sound Works in Paris, France—utilizes a DirectOut Prodigy MP speaker processing unit that enables the two theaters and pre-show room to share audio sources.
The film is narrated by native Alaskan fisherman Russell Cockrum, and since opening earlier this summer, Camp says, it has received rave reviews online, including for the quality sound. “All the owners love it,” he adds. “They’re glad that they spent the extra money.”
