Airpods pro 3 transparency buzz and low quality passthrough

Just received my Airpod Pro 3 and the transparency mode has a constant very slight background noise and the transparency mode is very artificial and compressed. My audiophile son describes it as life listening to the world through a snare drum. This contrasts with my AirPods Pro 1st gen which are seamless in terms of passthrough. The pass through on the new ones really distorts where sounds are coming from also and car engine noise is really altered which is a deal breaker as one major use case for me is walking and listening to audio books with transparency of for general awareness and safety. Do I just have a dodgy copy?