Digital swith Colby?

I am an extremely cheap fellow, but I want to use multiple changers with toslink output, but cannot justify your new DXS (cool as it may be). I was on a long drive yesterday, and I had a thought (probably not a good one, but here goes: Could you create 1-emitter/n-detector(s) for the slinke to plug into the TX RX ports that were not IR, but the frequency for digital/toslink, not to use as a mixer, but just a digital switcher. I know nothing about the details (perhaps the data rate is too high for slinke) If not, I assume this would be a cool (relatively cheap) addition to the nirvis bag of tricks.

If this is babble, don't mind me, I'm a software guy, so I always assume data streams are data streams.

Thanks for a great product.

BTW has anyone built Colby's budget analog mixer? How bad are the audio results?