Automator Workaround
I just spent a good deal of the evening looking for the same ability. A reply to an
old post on the Apple discussions forum from someone who didn't know about the "shift + option + vol" trick, gave me an idea on how to achieve a similar behavior in Lion via Applescript. I came across this post in my searching and thought I'd share my findings.
Open "Automator" and create a new "Service" workflow. Set the service to receive no input in any application. Add a "Run Applescript" action and insert the following in the script...
Code:
set vol to get volume settings
set volume output volume ((output volume of vol) + 1)
Save the workflow as "Volume Up". Create another service workflow the same way, but change the plus to a minus. Save it as "Volume Down". In Lion, the F11 & F12 keys default to Mission Control shortcuts. You'll need to change them to something else if you want to use those for your fine tune volume controls (if you just want to disable them, you'll need to set them to something else first to free up the shortcuts; I used F18 & F19). Now goto the keyboard shortcuts tab in the keyboard preference pane, select "Services", find the services you created with Automator, and double-click to the far right of each service to set the keyboard shortcut. If you did everything correctly, you should be able to press "fn + F11" and "fn + F12" to adjust your volume a little more precisely. Works great for me so far!