Some background... Envers builds its model by building a DOM representation of the audit entities in HBM form. It then hands that DOM off to the hibernate-core internals for processing. The problem is that we do not define support for AttributeConverters in HBM mappings. We do semi-support it for auto-apply AttributeConverters, mainly because it does not require xml changes.

Yes this approach (building a DOM) sucks and causes problems other than just this one. I have discussed with Adam Warski and Lukasz Antoniak, but they really no longer have time to tackle big changes to Envers. And this would be a massive change. If anyone is willing to help...

In the meantime, I am going to have to call this an improvement and unschedule. In the interim, you can work around this by using a Hibernate Type rather than an AttributeConverter.