I started to spell out in somewhat sarcastic detail why I'm not upset about the inability to dial into to 0.5ft and 0.5dB increments, but I stopped. It was an argument based largely on an old college debate between my senior-level Experimental Techniques class and our rather insane professor (a man who claimed to be able to draw perfect lines and circles freehand and who insisted that anyone should be able to measure down to 1/64th of an inch with a scale whose smallest increment of measure was 1/8th of an inch). He took it as a personal offense that we refused to deviate from "undergraduate" uncertainty analysis that insisted you could not measure anything closer than one-half of the smallest gradation of your measuring device, even though the intended purpose of the class was to learn to conduct tests and experiments in a manner that followed the accepted rules of experimental technique. Needless to say, most of us found the class a bit exasperating.

The 1 foot and the 1dB increments are pretty standard, and at least in my experience they've been pretty effective. A few people may find that it deprives them of an extra bit of fine control over system setup, but in most cases I don't see that it will do any harm at all. The real good news here, though, is the discrete distance settings for all eight channels - this is something that the 950 lacked due to limited processing power, and something that I think many people will find very helpful.