Can't connect/pair Bose Soundlink II Headphones to Ubuntu 16.04

[Fred Ferguson]

I've recently started using 16.04 on a Dell XPS 15 9550 and I'm unable to pair my Bose Soundlink II headphones. I've tried using the stock and blueman bluetooth managers and neither will work.

When I use bluetoothctl and run "pair [Device ID]" I get the following error:

Failed to pair: org.bluez.Error.AuthenticationFailed

I have seen several references to this online but believe there are still problems in 16.04

bluez:
  Installed: 5.37-0ubuntu5
  Candidate: 5.37-0ubuntu5
  Version table:
 *** 5.37-0ubuntu5 500
        500 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

[Fred Ferguson (fferguson6)]

I have followed the fix suggestion in bug #1589889. This has resulted in some progress in that I can now connect to the headphones, and once the headphones did register the laptop. But they disconnected straight away, and hasn't registered again since then.

I've tried the blueman manager as it tends to put out a bit more information than the standard bluetooth manager and i get the following:

Connection Failed: blueman.bluez.errors.DBusFailedError: Protocol not available

This device registers as several different components and when I specifically try to connect to the serial port I get the following message

Connection Failed: Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/blueman/services/meta/SerialService.py", line 29, in connect
    port_id = create_rfcomm_device(Adapter(props['Adapter']).get_properties()['Address'], props['Address'], 1)
  File "_blueman.pyx", line 218, in _blueman.create_rfcomm_device (_blueman.c:2127)
Exception: Can't connect RFCOMM socket

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.