Yikes! Cheap meter high-voltage warning noted.
I appears I stirred up the fates talking about the Imedions - last weekend I had the first early death of a pair of the AA's which typically last 5+ hrs in the DR2d but shut down this time after ~2hrs, just after the intermission, causing be to miss recording the best piece of the evening. They are currently in the fancy Maha charger undergoing the ~48hr break-in proceedure routine to see how well that restores them. I probably should have used the refresh mode or break-in mode on them more regularly, I only did that to break-in and match them as pairs when they were new and have only done a straight re-charge of each pair since. I'll certainly test them well before relying on them again. Might be time to rotate these to other duties and replace them with new ones. I'll have to check dates but I think I've gotten a solid 2-1/2+ years out of this set of 16 AAs so far, used across all my recorders.