Hi guys, this is possible, I've been using a free space laser to transmit digital audio from my TV to the surround amplifier for a few years now. The bandwidth of s/pdif is about 6-8MHz. The receivers can be had for a few dollars and contain built in thresholding and AGC. Search digikey for a TOSLINK receiver. For the transmitter you can use a few digital logic buffer gates in parallel, driving a transistor biased to keep the laser just below lasing threshold with a logic 'low' and a few 10s of miliwatts at logic 'high'. I used a CRT color drive transistor but a 2n2222 array should work equally well.