The monitoring and diagnostics of the rotating machinery have been received considerable attention for many years. The objectives are to classify the machinery condition and to find out the cause of abnormal condition. This paper describes a classification method of diagnosing the small reciprocating compressor for refrigerators using the artificial neural network and the wavelet transform. In order to extract salient features, the wavelet transform are used from primary noise signals. Since the wavelet transform decomposes raw time-waveform signals into two respective parts in the time space and frequency domain, more and better features can be obtained easier than time-waveform analysis. In the training phase for classification, self-organizing feature map(SOFM) and learning vector quantization(LVQ) are applied, and the accuracies of them ate compared with each other. This paper is focused on the development of an advanced signal classifier to automatize the vibration signal pattern recognition. This method is verified by small reciprocating compressors, for refrigerator and normal and abnormal conditions are classified with high flexibility and reliability.