thick, wide, depends on your angle of view (I'm usually horizontal) -
I really think DBX deadens things a bit, even when well-calibrated, though I made a nice-sounding recording with 16 track/DBX for Enja, at Systems 2 in Brooklyn back in the 1990s - another thing with DBX, if not done exactly right (and this may be a consumer issue), there is some audible distortion introduced on occassion, sometimes it can only be heard with headphones, but it is there - seems to have a problem with horns, on one tape my tenor was producing a slight bit of extra honk - it was not me, I assure you, but some weired noise-reduction artifact.
if I had the money and time I would get an old Ampex two track with the thickest tape possible - all tube with tube microphone pre-amps. Though I did make a really nice recording at Systems Two again, about 2 years ago, to disc, digital 24/96; what really made it turn out well was the fact that they used a Neumann tube on the alto, plus the fact that it's a wonderfully old-fashioned room - nice woody acoustics, lively enough but not too lively, just enough to let the musicians hear themselves correctly (which has a MAJOR impact on how much you can do when mixing, as over-compensation for a dead room has caused me problems on more than one post-production occassion) -