You have no idea how helpful your post has been to me!

If you open up Meridian USB Control Panel on your PC (it should be there are as part of the Explorer2 set up procedure) and click on ‘Device 0’ just below ‘Driver Info’ on the left hand side; a ‘output volume’ appears on the right hand side of the screen.

Click on that and a volume slider appears in the middle of the screen. You can then adjust that to set the gain on Explorer2 to a sensible level. So you can then have Foobars volume set to max without blowing your ears off and still get MQA.

All a needlessly obscure and confusing way to do something simple.

Forum Idiot