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In an automotive engine impulsive sounds and vibration are induced by faults or design constraints which degrade the sound quality of the engine. Thus it is important for an NVH engineer to detect and analyse impulsive sound and vibration signals for both fault diagnosis and also for sound quality assessment. However it is often difficult to detect and identify impulsive signals because of interfering signals such as those due to engine firing, harmonics of crankshaft speed and broadband noise components. These interferences hinder the early detection of faults and improvement of sound quality. In order to overcome this difficulty we present a two-stage ALE (Adaptive Line Enhancer) which is capable of enhancing impulsive signals embedded in background noise. This method is used to pre-process signals prior to time-frequency analysis via a bilinear methods such as the Wigner-Ville distribution and the Choi-Williams distribution.