*sigh*

Dick - your deep wit and sense of irony sometimes means you don't see it in others. (Or perhaps you do and we can circle round this forever to see who is being most ironic - [he said with a wicked glint in his false eye])

*deeper sigh*

As you know much better than me I'm sure - the sound of a diminished chord is **SO** distinctive that you couldn't miss it unless you didn't know what it was. A bit like an augmented chord. Or a chord with a different bass root.

It's nice if you have the ability to hear chord progressions but it is no greater skill than knowing what beer you're drinking, or which tea or what sort of bird flew past a second ago or who piajted a picture or recognising a prose style or spotting a singer in a second or recognising a fiddle player in a split second or anything that one finds easy and others don't.