Why does a modern probe carry its own amplifiers and converters instead of one wire per electrode? · Lobeworks/17

Because the bottleneck is the wiring, never the sensor.

Why does a modern probe carry its own amplifiers and converters instead of one wire per electrode?

Because the bottleneck is the wiring, never the sensor. Hundreds of tracks do not fit along a shank 70 µm wide, and long passive wires add capacitance and pick up noise before any amplifier. Putting switches in the shank and amplifiers, filters and converters in the base turns hundreds of faint analog signals into one digital stream on a few lines, the same move a camera sensor makes with its pixels.