Hi @kphs,
I am sure that you will need Jack running to start SP, so I am also quite sure that this has nothing to do with your hardware. It is certainly a good idea to follow Robin’s hint. If you need some information about Jack and its configuration Tutorial: JACK Audio Server might be a good and concise startiing point. The HowToJACKConfiguration might also be a good starting point if you’ll use qjackctl as GUI allthough I at some point couldn’t start Jack properly with it so I just used the command line (this is quite some time ago and I did not investigate but as I generally since then never had an issue starting Jack I use a simple shell script doing some things whenever I want to start Jack).