# Signal-Informed Temporal Routing for Vinyl Defect Regime Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23164 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.23164/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 2 of its 11 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [A Two-Stage U-Net for High-Fidelity Denoising of Historical Recordings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.08702/) (2022)
- [Realistic Gramophone Noise Synthesis using a Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06259/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vinyl restoration systems must distinguish isolated clicks, short bursts, dense crackle, and overlapping damage before selecting a repair operation. We present a lightweight two-stage detector in which signal-informed sparse, burst, and dense experts produce complementary defect evidence, and a temporal backend converts that evidence into stable repair regimes. The backend factors the five-way decision hierarchically, applies a validation-only mixed regime gate, and decodes with validation-selected transition penalties that outperform a maximum-likelihood transition matrix on the same emissions. On a source-separated synthetic benchmark of 597 non-overlapping 15 s excerpts drawn from 21 recordings, the held-out system reaches 0.730 pooled five-class macro F1 (95% CI 0.694-0.761), an improvement of 0.043 over a flat frame-level router (paired bootstrap p=0.001). Clean and dense frames are highly reliable, while sparse, burst, and mixed frames remain far more ambiguous.