The main components of the Whirlwind E Snake system consist of E Snake Frames (ESF) or E Snake 2 (ES2) master units and E Snake Control (ESC) software for managing the system. Two or more of these units connected to each other through an Ethernet switch with CAT-5 (UTP) or fiber optic cabling replace the traditional analog multi-pair audio snake. E Snake utilizes CobraNet, the industry standard for real-time, multi-channel networked audio. Each master unit (ESF or ES2) consists of a hardware frame and motherboard that can be configured with input cards and output cards. Each card is capable of processing eight channels of audio. An ESF can accept up to 4 input and output cards. Therefore, each ESF is capable of simultaneously processing 32 inputs and 32 outputs. ES2 can accept any two I/O cards and therefore process up to 16 inputs or 16 outputs or 8 of each.

Multiple master units can be used with Ethernet switches to increase the capacity to literally HUNDREDS of channels.