Shostakovich string quartets recommendation

"The Fitzwilliam is good but the sonics are dated."

I don't find anything to criticize about sonics of this set.

I'm hoping the Jerusalem Quartet does the whole cycle.

Birdies-- I too had the pleasure of seeing them live. They did the John Adams quartet dedicated to them and the Beethoven C# quartet as well as a Haydn quartet. I was disappointed that they did not do one of the Shostakovich quartets instead of the Haydn. The Beethoven and Adams were wonderful. I'd probably rather get my Haydn elsewhere though. On my way out, I heard one patron remark, "That concert was an assault on the senses." She got considerable support for her comment among other patrons. St. Lawrence is not for everyone.
I think the St. Lawrence style is perfect for Shostakovich. He was a man who lived in constant fear of Stalin's whimsical brutality. A man who smoked himself to death trying to cope with this never ending stress. A man who I think found an avenue for relatively free expression in his chamber works, which did not receive the same level of scrutiny that his symphonies and operas did. St. Lawrence just gets this music right.

I have the Borodin and Emerson. Agree with Krisjan in toto regarding Emerson. The best version I ever heard was of #8 being played by four high school students on a live radio broadcast from Atlanta, very raw, very wanton, and somehow what I felt Shostakovich must have intended.

The earlier Borodin set gets more inside the music, but its sound tends to be bright. The later or second Borodin versions, with slightly different personnel, has somewhat better balanced sound with very fine if not quite as visceral performances. The Fitzwilliam renditions are not as idiomatic as the other two, but they are solid nonetheless.