Dispersion Lempel–Ziv complexity (DLZC) and multiscale DLZC (MDLZC) are very recently introduced complexity indicators to quantify the dynamic change of time series in acoustics signals. They introduce the mapping steps of dispersion entropy (DE), which can effectively identify time series with different characteristics, but ignore the fluctuation information and have poor stability. In order to overcome these shortcomings, this paper firstly adds fluctuation information to DLZC and proposes fluctuation-based DLZC (FDLZC) as an alternative to the classical time series complexity index, followed by introducing an improved coarse-graining operation to propose the refined composite multiscale FDLZC (RCMFDLZC), which increases the number of features and also ensures the stability of FDLZC, and finally select the subsequence containing the most information by the minimum redundancy maximum relevance (mRMR) feature selection algorithm for subsequent experiments. The experimental results show that the extracted RCMFDLZC features have the strongest separability and better clustering effect in both bearing fault signals and ship radiated noise signals, and the RCMFDLZC-based signal analysis method also has higher recognition rate compared with other methods in bearing fault diagnosis and ship signal classification.