I'm not touching Creative anything again after woeful driver issues with one of their sound cards.
I use continually Creative sound cards since 2006, the only issue I ever had was when going from one OS to another, that the driver didn't have all its features implemented, which eventually they fixed.
Sorry, perhaps I understood your original post wrong, you've mentioned connecting the speakers to the front port so that made me think you're connecting them to the (amplified) headphone output
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I don't have a Z-series sound card at my disposal but the loudness depends on the amplifier in your speakers, not your sound card. Assuming your speakers are connected to your sound card's analog line-out port, then the sound card takes your audio "file", coverts it from digital to analog (with its integrated DAC), and sends it the converted audio signal, now in analog form, to the amplifier in your speakers. The amplifier then amplifies the signal and reproduces it through the speaker drivers (this is a simplified overview of the audio chain). If your speaker system is connected to your sound card digitally (USB, TOSLINK, coax), then the sound card only serves as a transport (it "forwards" the audio signal to the DAC found in your speakers), but still does no amplification of the signal sent to the speakers. I'm not able find much info about the speaker system you've mentioned (was it Edifier C200?) so I'm not sure how you're connecting it. Some devices use a higher line out level but you won't generally find those in the world of PC audio (google consumer vs pro audio levels).
As for the Schiit products, they're an excellent choice for users who want a great headphone amplifier/powered speaker preamp (some models), and don't need other features a "real" sound card would offer, such as an microphone input, and a software driver with an EQ, audio profiles, virtual surround, Dolby processing, etc. For example, for $190 you can get the iFi Audio Zen DAC V2, a fantastic DAC/headphone amplifier, which sounds audibly better and is significantly more powerful than any Sound Blaster. But it's a one-trick pony, as it doesn't do anything other than output audio.
Haha, well english isn't my language, probably that's the issue...but I also never said I connected the speakers to the "front port", I said "how about the volume of the speaker output (especially the front)?", I meant the front speakers (in opposition to the surround, sub and central speakers), or specially for stereo speaker purposes.
Then, well, probably another misunderstanding, but yes this volume I'm talking about does depends on the device, not the speaker's pre-amp. Test for yourself: grab some self powered speaker and feed it with different devices (internal and external sound cards, featureless DACs, TV through HDMI as I did, then cellphones, old discman, etc, etc) and you will find out all of them have different volume. Especially useful is testing with computer sound devices, so you can put the OS (and device) volume at the same level and compare.
I know about the sound chain.
My speakers are, as I mentioned, connected as they should be: to the SB Z's front speakers output (not front output, not headphones output, not any other output). Of course when using the onboard and the SB Audigy SE (as my now dead X-Fi Xtreme Music) the front speakers output is the same jack as the headphones output and one must change that with the driver. In the case of the TV/monitor, simply selecting HDMI as the sound device and connecting the speakers to the headphone's output of the TV, and this is the only case where I'm not connecting the speakers to the correct place.
But anyway, when speakers amps (or rather pre amps) are quite hard to drive, knowing the sound card output strength is useful. Could be impedance, voltage...don't know. These Edifier C200 have a preamp section with a NE5532
, then goes to some sort of semi digital part that controls the volume with a mechanical encoder (also for input selection and bass/treble setting, can't remember the name of the chip that uses for all that, I have the schematics somewhere) then it goes to the amplifier section where the main component is a TDA7379 A/B amp. 1" Silk tweeters 6.5" woofers with some coating, can't remember. 38-20000 hz (if it's really like that don't know the +- value...must be high...hehe), somewhat big cabinets, 25+25 Watts, nice shielded switching power supply.
The question for the Schiit was to the other dude. The always present dude in every Creative article/review/news that tries to evangelize / sell their featureless products that aren't for the ones the mentioned Creative product is aimed at, and can't understand any of Creative's features apart from being completely incapable to grasp concepts beyond stereo, as much for output as for sources...