A high-end soundbar with many HDMI ports can act like a receiver on a small scale. You can connect your media devices such as a Blu-ray player or gaming console to the soundbar and can pass-through their signals to the TV via the soundbar. It can act like a receiver when you just want to pass through signals of media sources to the TV through it. But you can’t connect additional speakers to it. Here it can’t be used as a receiver because the soundbar doesn’t have a preamp, amplifier, and audio video processor built into it.