Correction this happened on buster official disk not firmware as I wrote earlier I did a successful integrity test on the disk which is how I discovered this.
To recapitulate: You can install on any usb device you like but you must have the usb speakers disconnected and a traditional speaker set plugged into the system for the system to talk at all after first boot. I only got as far as entering my password in mate and never got any farther speech disappeared after that and swapping out speakers did not help either. --
