I'm just going to post this here and hope that I get some helpful replies. I just purchased a MartinLogan MLT-2 Home Theater System and am planning to hook it up to my computer's sound card. It's the SoundBlaster Z from Creative which is plenty capable of providing 5.1 surround sound. It has three analogue ports on the I/O that represent Front L/R, Rear L/R, and Center/Subwoofer. The issue I seem to be running into is the topic of 'powered speakers'. First off, I'm not sure what exactly that means, but I have a slight understanding. From what I can tell, my sound card should be acting as the amplifier in this situation and should be able to split the sound since it already has the three ports for the three ranges of sound being sent to the three groups of speakers, so I shouldn't need any type of receiver, correct? If so, I just need some guidance on how to wire all of this up so I can avoid purchasing a costly receiver (since ones that deal with only audio and not audio and video are rather hard to find).
Just for reference, each of the front and rear speakers, as well as the center speaker, have the positive and negative hookups, and the subwoofer has one red and one white 1/8" plug-in that are labeled '(LFE-in) Left in' and 'Right in' respectively.
How do I take those hookups, and connect it all to my sound card's three analogue ports?