The traditional intelligent diagnosis methods of rotating machinery generally require feature extraction of the raw signals in advance. However, it is a very time-consuming and laborious process for extracting the sensitive feature information to improve classification performance. Deep learning method, as a novel machine learning approach, can simultaneously achieve feature extraction and pattern classification. With the characteristics of Deep Belief Network (DBN) and one-dimensional Convolutional Neural Network (1D-CNN) (e.g. learning complex nonlinear, sparse connection and weight sharing), a precise diagnosis method based on the combination of DBN and 1D-CNN is proposed. Firstly, the DBN composed of three pre-trained restricted Boltzmann machines (RBMs) is constructed to achieve feature extraction and dimensionality reduction of the high-dimensional raw data. Secondly, the low-dimensional features extracted by DBN are fed into 1D-CNN for further extracting the abstract features. Finally, Soft-max classifier is employed to identify different operating conditions of rotating machinery. The superiority of the proposed method is validated by comparison with several state-of-the art fault diagnosis methods on two experimental cases. Meanwhile, the proposed method is tested in different background noises and on the imbalanced datasets. The results show that it has higher efficiency and accuracy than the state-of-the art fault diagnosis methods. INDEX TERMS Deep belief network (DBN), one-dimensional convolutional neural network (1D-CNN), rotating machinery, feature extraction, intelligent fault diagnosis.