48 Hours: Hard Evidence

I worked as sound recordist on 48 Hours: Hard Evidence, CBS’s long-running investigative true crime documentary series. The show takes a deep-dive format into a single case per episode — typically a murder investigation — building the story through interviews with investigators, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and people close to the case.

True crime documentary is demanding location sound work. A significant portion of the job is sit-down interviews in uncontrolled environments — someone’s living room, a courthouse hallway, a law office, a police station. None of those spaces are acoustically friendly, and you’re often setting up quickly under network schedule pressure. The goal is a clean, dry interview track that gives the editor maximum flexibility in post.

CBS’s 48 Hours has been running since 1988 and remains one of network television’s most durable newsmagazine formats. The Hard Evidence spinoff leaned into forensic and investigative detail — more courtroom, more technical expert testimony — which makes clean, intelligible audio from interview subjects especially critical. When the content is dense and factual, muddy or roomy audio is a real editorial problem.