This is just a milemarker for those who may also be having an issue similar to what I experienced lately. Â Hopefully the below summary is useful to somebody.
Problem #1: Bluetooth speakers connect to Ubuntu Linux just fine, but audio quality is crap.
Solution #1: Some BT speakers somehow get auto-identified as bluetooth headsets (aka for making phone calls) instead of speakers (primarily for music), and thus use a lower quality bluetooth profile. Â Pulseaudio (On ubuntu in the sound settings -> hardware tab) allows you to easily toggle between profiles.
Problem #2: Switching between the standard profile and the A2DP higher quality profile causes pulseaudio to crash. Â The crash output is something along the lines of:
E: sink.c: Assertion 'pa_frame_aligned(length, &s->sample_spec)' failed at pulsecore/sink.c:939, function pa_sink_render_full(). Aborting.
Semi-Solution #2: I don’t know of any proper solutions to the problem as of yet. Â Googling gets you to to places like this, Â http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.audio.pulseaudio.bugs/2317Â which only suggest a workaround of changing the default-sample-channel setting in daemon.conf to 2 instead of the default of 6. Â This fix worked for me (I only have 2 BT speakers), but obviously may be problematic for more complicated setups.
I haven’t tried using a more modern build of Pulseaudio/Pulseaudio modules yet, totally plausible that its fixed in trunk. Â It’s not exactly trivial to get a fully updated version of Pulse in a 12.04 Ubuntu LTS release, however. Â For now, it’s working so I’ll save poking that bear for another time.
This reminds me that I disabled Pulse on my desktop because loading its shim module was causing the ALSA libraries to get into an infinite loop in the runtime dynamic linker. I should really take a look at what’s actually causing that.