What does a "balanced tension" set actually mean?

An off-the-shelf set — a "Regular Light 10–46," say — is built to a balanced GAUGE progression: each string is a little thinner than the one below it, in steps a manufacturer has settled on over decades. That is not the same claim as balanced TENSION, because thickness and tension scale differently, string to string, once tuning and scale length enter the picture. Computing the actual per-string tension of this site's own electric-guitar Super Light reference set in standard tuning shows the real spread plainly: the wound D string carries about 15.8 lbs, the plain G about 14.7 lbs, but the plain B string drops to about 11.0 lbs — noticeably slacker than both neighbors, a dip of three to five pounds that a player can feel as that one string bending more easily and sitting slightly lower in output than the strings around it.

A tension-balanced set targets a much flatter spread by choosing each string's gauge (and sometimes its winding type) to land close to a chosen target tension rather than following a fixed diameter step. The tradeoff is gauges that look unusual on the package — a wound third, or a B string a manufacturer's normal progression would never ship — in exchange for a neck that feels more even under the fingers moving string to string, particularly noticeable to players doing a lot of cross-string work (fingerstyle, chord-melody, hybrid picking) where an unexpectedly slack or tight string among its neighbors is more disruptive than in straight single-note lead lines.

Balanced tension is not automatically "better" — it is a different design goal, and gauge-balanced sets have a century of players who like exactly how they feel and are not looking to change that. It matters most when retuning away from standard (the reference gauge progression was tuned FOR standard pitch, so any other tuning reintroduces the tension spread the gauge steps were built to avoid) or when building a genuinely custom set string-by-string, which is what this site's own /strings/tension builder does: choose a target tension profile, and it picks the closest real gauge for every string from the same physics table this page's numbers come from — never a second, separate formula.