Yes it is your sound card. Fortunately you only need to turn the volume up on your speakers until you can later adjust orca's volume programmatically in the orca preferences. I have found out just before running ubiquity that orca --nosetup & command issued as root is being misinterpreted as orca -t which tells orca to go into setup mode again. So that breaks the ubuntu install since orca insists on having to be logged in again each time after a log out in order to put the settings into effect.
