bad speaker in 4x12, still safe to use?

[hivemonkey]

I've got a b-52 4x12 cab with a bad speaker. Since I'm broke right now I just moved the speaker to the bottom of the cab and moved a good one up to the 'slanted' half. It sounds better, but still getting some volume loss (duh) and a little tone loss, especially on distortion.

My questions are:

1) am I risking damage to my gear by using a cab with 1 bad speaker? It's wired in correctly, and I AM getting some sound out of it (pulled it out and hooked it up to my stereo)

2) Since I *think* I'm getting some tone loss, I was considering pulling it entirely and changing the wiring accordingly. Is this dangerous? Should I pull 2 speakers (one bad one good) so I can get a 4 ohm cab (or is it 16 then?)

3) The distortion channel has a little bit of 'chop'. It's most noticeable when I play a triad and only happens for the first 1/4 second or so. I just got new power tubes so what's the problem? Could this be the bad speaker?

http://www.b-52stealthseries.com/LS412A_LS412B.html

[Jmann]

is it possible to do damage to your gear this way? yes. are you doing damage? probably not. you should check the impedance of the cab with the speaker in there to find out if it has dropped below the rating on your head. i'm guessing that it was originally an 8 ohm cab with the speakers wired in series parallel, if that is the case then you may be fine depending on the minimum impedance rating of your head. if your minimum impedance rating is 2ohms then you should just take the bad speaker out of there and wire the remaining 3 in series, that will give you maximum performance out of your amp and probably make up for your volume loss. all of this information is also based on the assumption that you have 8ohm speakers in the cab

[greybeard]

If you wire all three in series, you'll get 24 Ohms. If you wire them in parallel you'll get 2.6 Ohms.

Assuming, of course, that the speakers are 8 Ohms.

Wire up just 2 speakers and you'll get 16 Ohms in series and 4 Ohms in parallel.

[Jmann]

i meant to say parallel